Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution by Rachel Moran Read Free Book Online Page B

Showband. If, during my parent's frequent fights, my father couldn't afford to move out, he would retreat to the sitting room and live there, like it was his own little flat. It was filled with his records, guitars, amps and other musical equipment. He had everything you could need in there for a litde self-contained flat, including the sofa he slept on. He even bought his own ketde, and I used to sit outside listening to him play. He never found out about that. On and off for a couple of years my mother was in the habit of allowing me to stay up a bit later than the other children. Sometimes we'd pot plants together. I felt very close to her during those times and regardless of the absence of a mother-daughter bond, I did, and do, love my mother. It is difficult, both in the practical and the emotional sense, searching for the good times among the memories of a dysfunctional childhood. It is rather akin to hunting for pretty pebbles among the mass of shingle and shale of an enormously large beach. When you find them, they are lovely and precious because they're rare; but their very rarity reminds you how much crap surrounded them and kept them hidden. Their purity though, is so much the more beautiful for the contrast with all that surrounds them. And just now it hits me; maybe in this last line I have solved the riddle of those Kris Kristofferson tears. Chapters~
    IHOMELESSNESS
    We humans are so constituted that we need a sense of our own social significance. Nothing can give us more pleasure than the sense that we are wanted and useful. Conversely, nothing is more productive ofdespair than a sense that we are useless and unwanted. DR M SCOTT PECK, PEOPLE OF THE LIE I think people usually use the term 'homelessness' without ever really being able to understand what that means. I think they do so because homelessness, like prostitution, is not a place in life that is possible for someone to fully comprehend unless they've been there. A caring person will be moved by compassion to sympathise with the homeless, but unless they've been homeless themselves, they cannot truly empathise in the sense that they feel another's suffering. Not to be flippant, homelessness actually means sofalessness, chairlessness, tablelessness, Tv-lessness, fridgelessness, cookerlessness, showerlessness (a dreadful condition) and, worst of all, bedlessness. The word 'homeless' seems to present the condition as a single lack, but homelessness is actually many individual deficiencies combined. The worst ofthem are emotional; but to mention the physical challenges first: the single worst bodily aspect of homelessness is exhaustion. It is caused by several different factors including sleep-deprivation, hunger, and a constant need to remain on the move. I had left my family home a couple of months after my father's suicide. Within weeks of my father's death, my mother's paranoia and propensity for scapegoating had reached fever pitch and wt�rt� wholly concentrated on me. She assailed me verbally each and every day. In our constant rows she regularly spat out the suggestion that I should contact a social worker and find myself a hostel. The more I thought about her suggestion, the more it made sense to me. I was very scared about walking out into the world and striking out on my own, but my home life was simply intolerable and I knew I could not stay, so I did exactly as she suggested. I went down to the local health centre and asked to see a social worker. I felt very determined, as though I was finally taking control ofmy own life, but I crumpled into a mess oftears when I began explaining to the social worker why I was there. I kept repeating, 'I have to get out of there; I just have to get out of there'. She had me out of there within a week, and so began the dizzying experience of living in State care. My first placement was in a Salvation Army-run hostel in the city centre called Lefroy House. I was homeless sporadically over the span of the